to not know what unconditional parenting is?!

[GirlOutNumbered]

Just read it on a thread. I have no idea what this is?

I feel really strongly that chores shouldn't be linked to pocket money, actually. Linking to behaviour - fine if it works for you, but linking to chores specifically is problematic, because in the real world nobody gets paid to do housework. Even a cleaner has to do their own housework for free. And if you're paying then it becomes optional - they can opt to not do it and take the penalty of not getting the extra pay. Plus it just sets it up as something unpleasant, and sure, nobody likes housework, but it doesn't have to be a massive deal if everyone shares the load and we're all honest about which jobs we hate/don't like/don't mind so much, etc. If you just approach it as something that needs to be tackled by everyone because everyone lives here and nobody likes living in a mess, then they get the point of helping out too and are less likely to shirk off that responsibility when they're in a shared house at uni or living with a partner later on.

The pocket money is a puzzling one to me because we all need to work for money. I grew up thinking money grew on trees. I had a very spoilt childhood with absolutely no hardships, rl came as a shock as did the fact that I would have to work

So I'm wondering if just giving it will make them feel entitled but equally I don't want them to feel that all work must be linked to reward. So much of what is wrong in wider society is linked to this way of thinking, no care for the elderly/vulnerable because it is largely unrewarded/lowly paid. No one gets any pleasure out of helping others because we are trained to think that can be bought in payment/wages.

Yes, Mini that's what I thought. I would expect parents who UP to not give pocket money.

Being a SAHP does not mean that you are unrewarded financially. If that were the case, how would you pay your bills. You work in partnership with your partner who is earning money. If you didn't you wouldn't be able to SAHP.

Bertie if you are giving money which is not earned, then it's not pocket money. It's just money that you decide to give your dcs, for no reason, on a regular basis.

x-posted with Bertie brilliant point, if it becomes conditional on reward it might even mean that a job once unpleasant becomes more unpleasant and in addition.... optional, your so right.

No one gets any pleasure out of helping others because we are trained to think that can be bought in payment/wages

Not true! I personally have worked for charity and so have my children already. I have an elderly neighbour who I am more than happy to keep an eye on for no reward. I think these links are still very strong in a lot of communities.

We live in the SE and there is very little sense of community aside from clubs and organisations where people choose to belong.

Thanks Bertie and MavisG I will talk to DP because I think we shall just carry on giving DCs money when they need it. DP works full time and I am self employed so all money is family money. I don't think society is ready to reward or accord social labour any real value so paying for chores seems counter productive.

I think that you get a lot of pleasure out of helping others- I do it all the time for no reward - other than it helps someone.
Pocket money doesn't have to be connected to anything- it is quite possible to UP and have an allowance. You do however, whatever type of parenting, have to give them freedom to spend it the way they want or save it.
I think that DCs like to feel safe and protected. I knew a UP parent who would point out dangers and leave the DCs to decide- consequently she had 3 very timid children who didn't stray far from her- it is scary if you can't rely on your parent to keep you safe! She even used to get upset if other parents got anxious about them! Apparently she had told them the danger and they were sensible enough to take the right action!

^if it becomes conditional on reward it might even mean that a job once unpleasant becomes more unpleasant and in addition.... optional

But the UP way is optional from the start, right?

You wouldn't/couldn't make your dcs help with the housework. It has to be with their willing co-operation. So if they didn't want to do it, they wouldn't have to.

Mine have to help. They can do it for pocket money, or no money. Their choice, but not helping is not negotiable because I want them to learn responsibility.

Mini if you are really keen on charity work I can highly recommend it. My dcs gave up their own free time, one evening a week to peer mentor children with special needs. This was an accredited course which ran for several weeks.

My dd currently voluntarily helps immigrant teenagers integrate by another peer mentoring scheme which runs on a Saturday morning. It's a big commitment for a 16 year old to get out of bed early at the weekend

These are not 'club' or religion based but we found out about them by asking around.

At the moment it is optional and based on cooperation and their natural willingness to share and please and probably learn from doing new things. Hopefully it becomes habit but we'll see !

The charity idea is great, not many opps for someone only 12 though but I would encourage it. Well done your DCs fairenuff. You must feel proud sometimes volunteering feels more rewarding than paid work.

Keep your eye open in the local papers for new schemes. They are usually promoted when they first get up and running and you can get in touch and ask if there is any opportunity to help. You have to go with your dcs and be responsible for them because of insurance, etc. until they are 16 but I've found most places glad of the offer of help. You would have to be CRB checked though.

The amount of thought that UP's seem to put into thinking about how to parent their kids, and the amount of time that some UP's take to teach their kids something (the earlier teeth cleaning post springs to mind ) is mind boggling!

No doubt the UPs would say "but I want to do what's best and I want to spend time and effort of my kids"

I would find trying to parent like that a total head-fu@k to be honest

And totally, totally an unnecessarily over-indulgent parenting style.

These kids need to be taught how to behave as a member of a group. I.e. its not all about me, me me. That's really important for them - unless they plan to live on an island. Physically or mentally.

I'm also guessing that UPs also tend to be quite insular families. Not necessarily because they become isolated because other people dont want to be around their self-centred kids, but because UPs tend to view society as being more frightening and more risky than other people do.

I'm just basing this, by the way, on my experience of how the 3 UP families that I know of personally behave. So in some ways it's 100% accurate as it is based on direct experience but on the other hand it's a very small sample size so too small to draw generalisations from I realise.

n reality her elder DS suffered with a lot of anxiety/nerves - and I genuinely believe it was related to him being aware that he had too much responsibility, at too young an age.

My relatives kids are nervy one of them especially she did let them have far to much say in what i would think of as an parents job to decide, I dont want to go to school today so they all didnt go or we need to go here or buy that or it isn't my bedtime, they were equal and deserved to be heard apparently, now they are really not very good in social situations they but in they are rude and they say things like they would do to their friends, iyswim I do think their mum really did make a rod for her own back,

Faber & Mazlisch are not UPers, they are all for praise in lots of situations (Kohn bans praise, too!). They don't even ban punishment, they just see it as not very effective and like to promote more stable long-term alternatives based mostly on communication. I just pulled my copies from the shelves.

How to Talk: Natural consequences make sense, pgs 111-113 (remember Kohn says that natural consequences are just another form of punishment)

H2T: pg. 114-115 and elsewhere, Expressing disapproval as an alternative to punishment (Kohn would never sanction a guilt trip)

I'm not quickly finding examples from SWR, but there's nothing in there that says that parents can't propose solutions with rewards, bribes or sweeteners in them. Or that parents feelings don't count just as much as kids. Or that parents can't tell their children how unhappy or cross they feel.

There are a lot of screwed up adults around because, try as hard as the might, they couldn't get praise out of a parent.
This morning I saw a father and his DS out, the child was about 3years and on a scooter, they had been going along the pavement and turned into a road without, but with very little traffic. Father said ' now remember, you are on the road now' and the child slowed down and moved to the edge. The father said 'Good boy, that's the way to do it'. They obviously had a good relationship, it was all said in a very quiet, conversational manner. I expect that he was doing it to please his father- but does it matter? He was learning how to behave on the road, he was gaining confidence and it would become second nature.

I was running and I face oncoming traffic because I was told it was the safest way as a child and made to do it. My mother didn't explain the reasoning and then say 'of course it is up to you - you might not want to'!

mrsjay

Yep, that's how I reckon these kids will turn out too. You've got to feel sorry for them (but you still wouldn't want to be around them!)

All these parents who are trying to heal their own childhood wounds by raising their children in an alternate way to how they were raised are just jumping out of the frying pan and into the fat with that approach in my view.

I think UP is a well-meaning but very dysfunctional way of raising your kids, IF the intention is to later integrate them, and make them useful contributors, to society in general.

This really is our lot in life as parents though - for must of us anyway. We do our best for our children but they will inevitably turn round and tell us, as adults, that we fuc@ed them up and we will say "but we did what we thought was right, what was best for you"

zavi these kids are young adults and i know teenagers can be a bit grunty but they really are socially unaware of other people around them 1 told a story about her pissed friend and how she was a slag infront of my aunt and uncle they are in their 70s and uncle is a vicar

Yes, the other thing about these kids is that they are typically raised to not appreciate the unspoken/unwritten "distance" that exists between children and adults and thefore they make no distinction between their behaviour towarsd the two.

I hate interacting with these kids cos I know that their parents want you to take them so seriously all the time. They are difficult kids to have banter with. It really is tiresome.

Also, you can tell that the parents are minutely scrutinising every interaction that their kids have.

Just to give myself a bit of light relief when I'm with them I sometimes deliberately conjure up an excuse to SHOUT at my DC

"Stop it! Naughty boy!"

I can see them, physically, shudder

Naughty of me I know

Fairenuff "if you are giving money which is not earned, then it's not pocket money."

Surely a question of semantics? To me pocket money is money given by parents to children to spend on sweets, comics, whatever. It's not conditional although of course you can make it conditional if you wish - you're the parent.

Also "But the UP way is optional from the start, right?"

Not really. But it's not about the one person - the child. It's a different way of looking at it completely. Housework isn't an option. Somebody has to do it, and within a family it's the responsibility of everyone in that family to do it. I'm pretty crappy at keeping up with it if I'm honest, and DS is only 4, so fairly often we do get to the point where it's necessary rather than preferable to get stuck in and do stuff. It's better when DP is around

I don't force him to help, no, but he quite often offers to help of his own accord, and at various times he's asked me to play or do something for him and I've said well I have to do this at the moment, but if you like, you could help me and then it will get done quicker and I'll be able to play/help/whatever. And sometimes he does, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes he's annoying the crap out of me and I say look, if you're going to be down here then help me, if you don't want to help then please find something to do, but stop hanging around asking me questions which I keep repeating the same answers to.

Also it's just about taking advantage of the little interests they have when they're tiny so that helping becomes easier when they're older, and trying not to get annoyed/frustrated when they're more of a hindrance than a help, seeing it as a long term investment rather than a short term thing. Like when DS pulled the washing machine drawer out mid-cycle when he was 2 and spilled half dissolved powder everywhere, my first instinct was "Aaaargh look at the mess!" but instead I thought, well, he was probably trying to help/copy me, so I showed him how the drawer worked properly, and how and when to put the powder in and let him help after that by putting the powder in when I ran a wash load. He never tried to pull the drawer out by himself again, and now he knows which line the powder needs to come up to and where it goes.

Similarly one day when DP was here I was sorting some clean laundry out into piles and DS came up and I was really antsy because he didn't even notice the piles and was happily walking all over them, tripping on them, picking up random clothes to use as a cape, whatever. DP called up the stairs "Let me know if you want me to come and get him" and I was getting annoyed and was about to call him when I decided to try and see if he was actually interested or just wanting me to do something else, so I explained (in a really strained way if I'm honest) that I was sorting this into Daddy's pile, this into Mummy's drawer, etc, and oh look, can you see if there's another sock that matches this one in that pile? etc. And he ended up helping - ok it wasn't any quicker than me doing it myself, but now he's learned that socks need matching up and that they don't appear in his drawer magically paired. That when the clothes come out of the machine they're all mixed up and somebody has to sort them out and put them into piles/drawers and that if we treat them nicely they look all smooth but if we just scrunch them, then they get crumpled and need ironing (which by the way he loves the idea of, but I won't let him touch until he's big enough and co-ordinated enough to control the iron safely!)

I'm not hopelessly naive and I'm sure that at some point in the next few years he's going to twig that housework is pretty boring and mundane, but at least he knows that it has to be done and maybe a bit about what it entails, rather than vaguely thinking that the housework fairy does it all.

Also although UP is against praise per se it's not saying that you can never express pride or say anything which is vaguely affirming. I'm pretty sure UP doesn't say that you let your child choose for themselves the safest way to cross a road - if it does, that's stupid.

exoticfruits Fri 15-Feb-13 20:02:39
"One of my favourite sayings was 'what did your last servant die of?'"

I used this on ds once. He turned round on me with a very fair imitation of the Maternal Death Stare and said in a very firm voice:

" Through not doing as he was told ."

(don't worry, I didn't give in, I never do; but ds is the eternal optimist, he never gives up trying )

Love it, cory! Mine never thought of that one.
My favourite ever was telling a DC at school just to use their common sense- it was in reply to some question- and she said 'what's that?'! There does seem to be a lack of it these days.

When I ran workshops for the HE kids they completely failed to interact with the other 16 year olds in my group. And, the stuff they came out with was just inappropriate.

Then again - these kids didn't ever really have a chance. Their parents were a nightmare to deal with, just really poor social skills and oblivious to the 101 social indicators that make eeryone's lives so much smoother.

that

I hate interacting with these kids cos I know that their parents want you to take them so seriously all the time. They are difficult kids to have banter with. It really is tiresome.

I am a bit the same I don't feel comfortable around them I never have really even as young children it isn't because they are teens I have my own its just im not even sure what it is I think it is the uncertainty of what they will say or do next, their mum will go home if her parents say anything about their behaviour